History Associates Contracted by the National Park Service to Arrange and Catalog Museum Archives
Initiative will preserve and improve accessibility of NPS archives at over sixty sites.
ROCKVILLE, MD, December 13, 2010
The National Park Service (NPS) has awarded a multi-year contract to History Associates Incorporated to arrange and catalog its museum archives at over sixty NPS sites located across the United States and its territories. This is an IDIQ (Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity) contract, issued for a term of one year with four option years."We are proud to be working with the National Park Service on this initiative," said History Associates president Brian Martin. "This extensive project builds on our excellent track record providing similar services to individual parks, and my colleagues are very excited to be helping NPS to preserve and make available these collections that are integral to maintaining and interpreting our treasured national parks."
Many park sites maintain archival collections that support their resource management activities; however, NPS identified approximately 21,000 linear feet of archives that are unprocessed and uncataloged. At some sites, the collections are too small to justify a permanent staff archivist; in others, backlogs are too large for existing staff to handle. In both instances, this wealth of primary resource material has been unavailable to users. As authorized by NPS officials, History Associates archivists will conduct an initial site visit and prepare a processing plan for each park. They will then systematically process and catalog the materials in each archival collection.
The award of this contract resulted from a rigorous review process that included careful scrutiny of the proposals by the NPS Museum Management Program. Comments from NPS indicate that History Associates' professional ability and track record coupled with their proposed processing plan and ability to ramp up staffing were significant factors in the company's selection.
About History Associates
For nearly thirty years the historians and archivists at History Associates have demonstrated that history is valuable in the market as well as the marketplace of ideas. Our more than forty employees provide professional historical research, histories, exhibit content development, interpretive planning, and archives and records management to clients throughout the United States and around the world. History Associates serves corporate, government, legal, and nonprofit clients from its headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, with an office in Brea, California. History Associates strives to be The Best Company in History (R). For more information, call (301) 279-9697 or visit http://www.historyassociates.com.